I know I found myself looking across a quadrant of lake water too often. I used binoculars, hoping to see Fiona bent over in a less-than-modest dress. I thought about how my wife was long gone.
The first time I met Fiona she knew I was watching her numb the soil, so I should have known she could feel me watching her two hundred yards away. One morning she knocked on my door and I answered. When she said, “You want a telescope?” I could only hope that I heard wrong.
“Hey, Fiona. Come on in for some coffee,” I said.
She said, “Is it one of those flavored coffees? You know those flavored coffees have chemicals in them that they don’t advertise on the box.”
I said, “It’s regular coffee. I have some bread, too. I was just about to have breakfast. Come on in.”
She stood there wearing the only skirt I’d ever seen her wear, the one that sunlight ravished without much effort. Fiona said, “Weldon, right?”
I said, “Uh-huh.”
She said, “I know when you’re watching me, Weldon. You aren’t doing anything weird up here, are you?”
I said, “I’ll confess that I watch you. I’ve never seen anyone care about blemishes so much. I apologize, and I’ll quit, but I promise I’m not doing anything perverted. I’ve had a wife and I’ve had girlfriends. Not at the same time, either—I took a course in ethics one time in college.”
That wasn’t true. I mean, I had not taken a course in ethics, which I figured gave me the right to tell a lie. Fiona said, “Did you use any preservatives in your bread?”
I told her I washed my hands between each knead.
WHEN WE FUCKED daily for the next six weeks we did so slowly. Fiona wasn’t sure about my cabin’s pilings—whether or not they were planted loosely—or whether our rhythm might tamp down into her mother like the misstroke of a blunt-ended toothbrush that jabs your gums. I did not tell her about her husband’s uncle’s cousin’s daughter. I did not break male code in that way. And there was no love between Fiona and me, at least that first week: We only whispered about the earth moving, often.
But I said more than once in her ear, “Where were you when I thought I should get married?”
“Probably getting married. Or in Santa Fe learning massage therapy,” Fiona said to me more often than not.
DESMOND CAME OVER finally in midsummer. I felt uncomfortable, of course. We hadn’t spoken since I told him to scrap Chickens. Desmond said, “Weldon, I’ve been thinking. I don’t want to be nosy, but how do you live? You don’t work in advertising anymore, do you, Weldon? You don’t have a home office upstairs so you can just fax what you’re thinking, do you, Weldon?”
Desmond seemed to have something to say.
I said, “I saved money well and invested okay. I work as a consultant sometimes but don’t seek it. I don’t like to brag or anything, but people in the industry know me, and when they’re out of ideas they get in touch and offer me money. An adman without an idea is an ex-adman in about a thirty-second spot.”
Desmond said, “Huh.”
I said, “I thought you’d be wearing a beret by now. How’s it going?”
“Oh, I’m set, amigo,” he said. I poured bourbon. “I ain’t got a story line or anything but figure I can do it through editing. Are you sure this’ll work out?” Desmond didn’t sit down when I shoved the chair out for him.
I couldn’t lie. I said, “Well. Maybe your wife’s not as quirky as I thought.”
“So you’re saying Fiona’s not odd enough to star in my film, is that what you’re saying? You saying my wife’s too average to care about? I don’t think you know what you mean, Weldon.”
Desmond had a different edge to him. He bowed up on me good. People in the South sometimes think Northerners display a certain curtness, a certain broad and blatant cruelty toward other human beings. It’s a misconception that thrives with others—such as how dead blacksnakes on fence posts end droughts, or crossing a downhill stream will stop a specter. People from the Northeast are kind, really. Unlike me—and the people I know—they don’t constantly scheme at ways to kill friends, acquaintances, and relatives.
I said, “I’m saying I don’t know what I’m saying.” Desmond held his fists at his sides. In this short time I’d already considered throwing him off my porch headfirst, taking the fire poker to his temple, even rigging a clipped and frayed electrical wire from an outlet into my toilet so when he peed out his bourbon it’d shock him hard. When I stuck up one index finger and shook it like a scolding mother from a fifties movie, Desmond evidently thought I foreplayed a shot to his nose. He decked me quick, then. He said, “I know about you fucking Fiona, Weldon. I got movies and I got a lawyer.”
I’VE REALIZED THAT the more isolated a person attempts to be, the more people know about him. I’m sure everyone on Mount Christ Almighty, and the valley towns of Tryon and Columbus, even smaller Lynn and Green Creek, knew that I had a scalp condition that required dandruff shampoo. Or that I had the occasional bout with athlete’s foot when I worked in scawmy conditions, or that I had hemorrhoids from worrying too much about my goddamn feet. People knew these things because I could do my grocery shopping at one place only—a family-owned store down the mountain called Powell’s.
When this buzz-cut kid handed me a subpoena to show up at Fiona and Desmond’s divorce proceeding, he held a handkerchief to his mouth. I said, “Have you got a bad cold or something? I took a bath this morning.”
“I don’t want to get the tuberculosis,” he said.
“I ain’t got TB.”
“Well, you had to go down to the doctor last week, and you haven’t bought any cigarettes since, and you had a coughing fit down at the Waffle House,” the kid said.
“Oh. Oh, yeah. It’s not tuberculosis, man,” I said. “It’s rabies.” I took two quick steps his way so he jumped clean off the porch, eight feet off the ground.
I’d gone to the doctor to get some shots because I’d been hired to check out the chances of a Disney project in Kuwait. I told them to save their money, but they didn’t. That Gulf War thing took place soon thereafter. There you go.
I lied in front of the judge and jury, in front of the packed house at the Polk County courthouse, in front of Fiona, Desmond, and their respective lawyers. I said, “No sir, I never had sex with her in my house. It’s true she came over as the films indicate.” Then I said, “On more than one occasion Fiona came over looking for Bactine, Neosporin, and gauze.” I made it sound like Desmond beat her or something, but I didn’t care. Desmond had the brains to point one of his little cameras toward my front porch. The jury saw something like forty-two clips of Fiona walking in my front door, all but one of me hugging her there. When Desmond took the stand he swore I’d told him about my scams just so I could lure his wife over my way. He’d put his hand on the Bible and everything, and looked the jury straight. Obviously they believed him. Luckily, no chicken followed Fiona over or we might have been sentenced to the electric chair. This was the South.
Of course she lost everything. Juries from the mountains of western North Carolina don’t care about mental cruelty or impotence or abuse. It’s as if “Stand By Your Man” is piped into the chambers.
The prosecutor asked me, “Do you know what kind of person you are, breaking up a marriage?” I sat silent. “You’re nothing but a coward, lying like this. Do you know the meaning of coward?”
I tried not to shake. I didn’t look up or down, or sideways back and forth haphazardly, like an animal confused by rain.
I didn’t mention to Desmond’s lawyer how the mountains of North Carolina are filled with garnets and rubies and emeralds and mica. I didn’t say how one day when Fiona came over she made me lie naked in the sun, and placed semi-precious gems on what she understood to be pressure points on my body.
I understood, too. I’m talking sundial—she put a rock right on the end of my pecker. Fiona said, “I’m trying to learn the proper and beneficial uses of magnets, but I don’t feel sure about myself ye
t.”
In the distance we heard Desmond’s roosters crow. Fiona put rocks on herself, and we both fell asleep. I got a sunburn, and when I woke up it looked like someone had written tiny O’s on my body. I’d never felt better in my life—when Fiona rolled over on me our white marks fit like pistons, I swear. Let me say right now that it was at this point that I knew I loved Fiona, and could work as the conductor on her trainload of neuroses. Call it luck or predilection on her part, but those stones made me feel different about myself and the rest of the world, and the way things would end up in the future.
The prosecutor said, “Boy, I believe you got some Sherman in you, what with the way you burned a marriage with a perfect foundation.” He pointed over at Desmond and said, “What else could you have done to this poor man?”
YEARS LATER ON, reading about how Chickens won those independent film competitions, I had all kinds of reactions, most of which involved duct tape, a hard-backed simple chair, a pistol butt, and a smile. I read that in France the movie was called Les Poulets, of course, and audiences considered it some kind of classic. In Holland or Denmark the film went by plain Peep-peep. Because Desmond won the divorce, he also got the house and half of Fiona’s worth, enabling him to back himself on his own project. Fiona came from a wealthy family, too. What I’m saying is, I damn near forgot that women named Fiona either numbed the ground when they walked, or took in strays, or had a trust fund the size of influenza.
We live quietly these days and we compromise. Sometimes Fiona circles that gray patch on the back of my head as if she were mixing a drink with her finger. She says I’ll come up with a vision for us both. I don’t make fun of her when she goes outside at night and cries with the stars and moon. And unlike most people, I’m now allowed to stomp on this earth.
HOW TO COLLECT FISHING LURES
MOVE OFF OF THE FAMILY FARM, GO TO A STATE UNIVERSITY that offers a degree in textile management, get a job at a cotton mill that will eventually fail during the Reagan years, marry a woman who will go back to college later on in life then leave you for three states south, have one son named with only initials—like V. O.—and try to get him to understand the importance of moving out of the textile town, get fired so that the company no longer has to pay a pension, and spend too many days sending out resumes to other failing cotton mills that have no need for a forty-seven-year-old midlevel executive. Send your son off to college and wonder what he sees in literature, history, philosophy, art, and Eastern religions.
Try not to think about your lungs looking like kabobs of half-eaten cotton candy. Go to the unemployment office in your small South Carolina town and feel worthless, useless, lost, and emasculated. Spend time watching programs that have more to do with collectible treasures and less with world, domestic, regional, or local news. Watch infomercials into the night. Go to a bookstore where too many young people hang out without touching books, find the section of antique price guides and memorize the names, photographs, and prices of jigs, topwater plugs, spinners, spoons, minnow tubes, and frog harnesses. Decide to take a scuba-diving course that won’t cost more than one (1) unemployment check. Learn to cook and eat macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, ziti, rice, and mashed potatoes. Remember the documentary you saw on carbo-loading.
Invest what extra money you don’t have into a wet suit, oxygen tank, mask, and flippers. If, for some reason, you did not acquire forced shallow breathing (FSB) from the mill, invest only in goggles and snorkel.
Drive to the nearest man-made lake and walk it. Step off distances. Practice at home using a yardstick so that your steps equal thirty-six (36) inches with each pace. Take extensive notes as to where men older than you fish for largemouth bass. Make a map of the place. Point out points, coves, creek mouths, beaver dams, and where the men in boats—usually the men a level above you at the cotton mill, or their sons—drop anchor or troll.
Realize that just because an antique-price guide claims that a Clothes Pin Minnow goes for two to three hundred dollars ($200-$300) doesn’t mean that anyone in Forty-Five, South Carolina, might pay that much money for it at an antique show, flea market, or yard sale. Just because someone in New York, California, or Colorado might be willing to lay down two to three thousand dollars ($2,000-$3,000) for a Flying Hellgrammite Type II, manufactured by the Harry Comstock Company out of Fulton, New York, in 1883 before being bought out by Pflueger Enterprise Manufacturing Company in Akron, Ohio, doesn’t mean that everyone will offer only five bucks ($5) for the thing in Atlanta, Charleston, Charlotte, or Raleigh.
Go to the closest bars, roadhouses, and bait shacks and talk to every human being possible. Pretend to be interested in how they caught their biggest bass. Secretly tally who used live bait, who used rubber worms, and who used lures that you want.
By this time, too, it should become apparent that you should no longer tell friends or relatives about your latest ambitions. They will insist that you go to the local psychologist and take a battery of examinations ranging from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) to the Barriers to Employment Success Inventory (BESI), with everything in between—vocational interest tests, career interest inventories, the John Holland Self-Directed Search, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and a dexterity test that involves pegs, washers, and caps.
You’ve already withstood these tests one long afternoon instead of standing in line at the unemployment office.
Buy an underwater flashlight, a mesh cloth bag, and some needle-nosed pliers. Take the first dive somewhere near a cache of sunken Christmas trees. After you find your first Surface Tom, King Bee Wiggle Minnow, or Hell Diver, stick it in your bag and resurface. I don’t want to make any broad generalizations or cheap jokes, but you’ll be hooked. Go buy a johnboat immediately.
You’ll need the boat in order to go out past dusk—using the flashlight—and drop heavy objects into the water where you know men and women fish. Cement blocks work well, as do long bent pieces of rebar, old front fenders, spools of barbed wire, and certain cement statuaries (lawn jockeys). Leave these in place for at least two months before visiting the scene. What I’m saying is, be a patient farmer—harvest, sow, re-harvest. If you have searched all of the likely lost, snagged, and badly knotted fishing lure regions of a particular lake, then go to another lake, map it out, talk to locals, and so on. Allow Lake Number One (#1) to repopulate itself with the bait you will find later.
Remember: Scuba diving is not an inexpensive mode of transportation. It’s better to take two or three trips down for a hundred lures than a hundred trips for a hundred lures. For those who’ve retained Pink Lung and chosen simple snorkeling, no one knows for sure about the Bends, really.
Now that you have a good collection of rare vintage fishing lures in various stages of wear, think about presentation. Stick them haphazardly in a shadowbox. Attach them to mesh bags similar to the one you use while on a pilgrimage. Gently stick them into the yardstick you own if that yardstick has some kind of maritime theme, viz., Shady Grady’s Bait ‘n’ Tackle—We’ll Give You Worms; or Gene’s Marina—All Size Slips. Either clean the lures until they look unused and put them in a fake original box, or dirty them up more so.
There are people out there with large vacation houses who will buy the latter option. It might not be bad to purchase a few bobs, run them over with a car, then reglue them nearly together. The vacation-house people will buy anything to give themselves a sense of doing something dangerous and near-tragic when they grew up.
As did your wife three states away.
If you choose to sell off duplicates—and you will—and if a day comes when you feel a full-lunged breath release from your body for the first time since losing the job, maybe send your ex-wife a cheap Ball Bearing Spinner, plus a note saying that y’all’s son is well, and that signs of panic and danger diminish with each new morning. By this time she’ll know about your irrational hobby. Write, in detail, complete lies about snapping turtles, gar, water moccasins, a big sale of Wilcox Wigglers an
d the women who bought them.
Or get in the johnboat, turn off all lights, ride as fast as possible until you hit an exposed stump, and sink.
SET YOUR ALARM clock for four o’clock in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays if you live within a half hour of a flea market. Otherwise set it accordingly. Make a thermos of coffee the previous night. Sleep in your clothes if at all possible. In the winter, wear a watch cap. In warmer weather wear a sleeveless shirt and pants with at least one (1) hole in them. Either wear old Converse tennis shoes or comfortable hiking boots. Pick up the morning paper at the end of the driveway.
Be sure to have a pocketful of case quarters only.
Don’t wear a goofball cap that reads “I COLLECT FISHING LURES” on the front. Take along a flashlight and a bag that isn’t mesh or plastic. If people selling good old lures at a flea market see you coming with the hat, they’ll jack the price about four (4) to ten (10) times what they originally wanted. There’s been documentation. If they see a bag that they think contains lures, they’ll at least double the original asking price. You have only quarters because if someone’s asking, say, two dollars ($2) for a lure, automatically say, “Will you take a quarter for it?”
Let’s say y’all dicker until it gets to a dollar, a fair price for a Rhodes Wooden Minnow seeing as it books between fifty ($50) and seventy-five dollars ($75). Then say you forgot to take your quarters, and pull out a twenty-dollar bill. The seller might be likely to either, (A) not sell you the lure; or (B) kill you.
Nevertheless, do not take a loaded pistol with you, especially if someone plans to tag along.
I’ll explain this later. Go alone whenever possible, of course.
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